


The Wreck

by BlackjackKent



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Normandy crash site
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-14
Updated: 2014-09-14
Packaged: 2018-02-17 09:33:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2304944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackjackKent/pseuds/BlackjackKent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard remembers the crew lost in the wreck of the Normandy at Alchera, two years before her resurrection by Cerberus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wreck

My armor is supposed to be thermally proofed against this sort of place. Insulated padding, vacuum-sealed joint seams, airtight helmet, temperature-controlled environmental system. I can’t actually feel the cold of the wind that whips at me, almost staggering me off my feet, or the icy wetness of the snowflakes that blow into my heated faceplate and disappear in small puffs of steam.

But the chill in the pit of my stomach is there all the same, and the weather has nothing to do with it. It is the chill of death, the sense of standing in a graveyard on the bones of friends.

This is where the _Normandy_ fell.

The wreck is scattered across a good square kilometer, bits and pieces of tangled metal nestled in the crevices of mountainous terrain sloping down into a canyon. It’s like looking at the fossilized remains of some great dead beast, the skeleton of an animal half-buried in snow. _My ship._ I died trying to save it, but somehow I’m still here and it lies scattered in pieces around me. If Alliance intel is right, twenty of the people under my command lie buried here in the ice. It’s too late to do anything for them, but perhaps I can retrieve something of what they were.

The first set of dogtags is almost under my boots as I start moving away from the shuttle. I squat carefully to retrieve it, turning over the metal plates in my hand, reading the words engraved on the metal.

_Alexei Dubyansky._ I remember the name, and then the face that went with it, a pair of laughing blue eyes and strong shoulders. He had been tall and lean and full of energy, one of Joker’s friends who would often be found in the cockpit, lounging in the copilot’s chair. _Shepard_ , he’d cry with a grin when I entered the bridge. _Look at that star, Shepard. Isn’t she beautiful?_

I pocket the tags, but a few steps onward another pair clinks under my boots. _Marcus Grieco_ , this time, a mass effect field dynamics physicist. He was as quiet as Alexei had been loud, but warm, too, in his way, when he could be coaxed out of the engine room. The engineers threw him a birthday party on the Citadel, a few weeks before the crash. I smile slightly at the memory of Marcus resting peacefully on his side in the loading bay, mumbling about how he had never known such good friends.

And then the smile fades, because I remember what that friendship got him in the end. I can feel the thin, hard edge of the tags through my gloves as my fist squeezes around them.

The next set, glinting under the overhang of a slab of heat-twisted metal, is labeled _Carlton Tucks_. As soon as I see it, I’m looking again, and with dismay but not surprise I find its partner. Hector Emerson’s tags are half-buried under a fallen metal pylon that has frozen against the rock beneath it.

I have to fire a thermal clip and pop the heat sink into the snow to melt them free. When I finally tug them from their resting place, I turn them in my hands for a moment before deliberately setting them next to Carlton’s in my pack. The two had been a cute couple, I remember -- engineers as mad for each other as they were for the ship, always to be found in the mess or the barracks with some piece of tech, muttering excitedly. They’d been planning a wedding at our next shore leave…

_Orden Laflamme._ I have to take a moment to place the name because everyone always called him Firefly. An ex-fighter pilot-turned-mechanic with bright red hair to match his name, he’d charmed the ladies on shore leave with smooth French sophistication but wrestled the Mako into submission with utility wrenches and some of the most creative profanity I’d ever heard. His tags are overshadowed by the heavy bulk of the M-35 itself, which has landed intact and sits immortalized in a snowdrift.

God, I hated that tank. But it’s hard to think about that, remembering Firefly and his ongoing wrestling match, the sort of love-hate that grows out of having put part of yourself into something. He’d had passion. The whole crew had. We knew what we were fighting for.

These days, with a Cerberus cruiser waiting to pick me up in orbit...it’s hard to remember.

_Helen Lowe. Abishek Pakti. Robert Felawa_. I’ve wandered into the wreck of the causeway from the CIC to the cockpit. I remember all three faces, young and bright-eyed, always watching me as I walked back and forth. They’d all jockeyed for my approval, playfully teased each other about crushes on the commander of the _Normandy_ when they thought I couldn’t hear -- though of course I heard everything. It was my job.

And now the marines, the wreck of the barracks and armory. Caroline Grenado -- nicknamed Blasto for her last name, sure, but also her love of the hanar Spectre flicks. Addison Chase, who played handheld video games every hour she was off-duty. Jamin Bakari, who was doing a remote degree in geophysics paid for by the military, quick and wildly intelligent and yet a brilliant shot with a sniper rifle. And poor Raymond Tanaka, who had taken his friend Rick Jenkins’s death very hard after Eden Prime, going from a mischievous prankster to a grave machine of geth destruction almost overnight.

In a way I’m almost glad, in a morbid, harsh way, to find Rosamund and Talitha Draven’s tags together. Twin sisters from Elysium, lucky enough to be stationed on the same ship, they were intelligence and comm officers, masters of decryption and tracking, and utterly inseparable, connected to the point of finishing each other’s sentences. I can’t imagine one of them surviving without the other; it would have been...monstrous somehow.

It’s all monstrous, of course. Being the living, breathing corpse that I am, I can hardly think otherwise.

Harvey Gladstone and Mandira Rahman, the two off-shift nurses who were Karin’s protégés, were thrown far from the wreckage, by the looks of it; their tags are embedded in the walls of ice rising from the nearby crevice in the planet’s surface. I wonder if I should tell Karin that I found what’s left of them, whether it would bring her any measure of peace or simply reopen old wounds. I wonder if it’s bringing _me_ any measure of peace. Somehow it doesn’t feel like it.

I find myself wondering why I came. And yet I can’t stop the soft crunch of my boots moving forward through the ice-sheened snowscape, out of a mixture of loyalty and morbid fascination, searching for pieces of my past, faces who existed in a blur until I lost them.

_Monica Negulesco_. I remember her -- vividly, in fact -- and my stomach twists a little as I find her tags, dented and chipped, the chain wrapped and tangled around one of the crashed ship’s landing struts. She was in the command track like me, a young and fiery soldier who’d sparred with me in the drop bay every week, revered the ground I walked on and yet tried her best to punch my lights out, and then asked for my advice when we collapsed, beaten and bruised and catching our breath.

And Amina Waaberi, who hated my guts and held me responsible for the death of her family at Eden Prime. I remember her eyes, pale green and narrow, always watching me from the corner of the CIC. I remember her putting in for a transfer after the Battle of the Citadel...and I remember the approval sitting on my desk, not yet signed, when the Collector ship hit us. The guilt falls into my stomach like I swallowed a rock.

I’m into the last few now, the remains of the CIC. Under the cracked galaxy map platform I find Germeen Barrett and Silas Crosby, and I remember the two handsome young men, the quartermaster and armory sergeant, who had worn them. I remember best friends, the prank war that spanned two decks and eight months, the late watch ribald jokes they thought their CO couldn’t hear, the hungover eyes that had watched me on the mornings after Citadel shore leaves. I remember...youth, vitality...life.

I try to imagine people like them slipping into the sober wariness of my new Cerberus crew. It’s a poor fit.

And Pressly...oh, God, the last set is Pressly. Poor old Charlie, the Skyllian Blitz vet who stepped into my shoes as the _Normandy_ ’s XO without a moment’s hesitation or complaint, who held the line on board ship (a thankless position at best) while I was off having adventures and taking the glory and the burden of the ground war. Charlie, who grew tremendously in the time I knew him, fought to shed years of xenophobia in favor of the team we all knew we had to build. Charlie who deserved a medal and a promotion rather than the icy tomb of Alchera.

Twenty tags. Twenty crew unaccounted for, according to the intel Miranda gave me. I can do no more here, and yet for a long time I simply stand in the snow, staring out across the starlit expanse, feeling the chill settle deep in my bones. Death and ice are the coldest things in the universe, and on Alchera I feel them both. And the shiver they put into me stays in my gut long after I’ve returned to the _Normandy_ ’s light and warmth.


End file.
